‘Health­ier’ dough­nuts: a pos­si­bil­ity?

JC Food hunts down new things for your kitchen and gives you the low down on whether you need it:

WHAT IS IT?

A set of colour­ful sil­i­cone moulds and a fancy cut­ter.

WHAT DOES IT PROM­ISE?

An easy-to-use kit way to make baked, not fried, dough­nuts for a health­ier treat.

WHAT DOES IT DO?

It is not so much what does as what it helps do. The kit con­sists of four ring moulds and four moulds for filled dough­nuts, plus a nifty cut­ter to cre­ate the ring dough­nut shapes. You make the dough, let it rise, cut out the dough­nuts and plonk them in the moulds to prove and bake.

DOES IT WORK?

I was really ex­cited to get my hands on this kit — who doesn’t love a dough­nut? First prob­lem — no ob­vi­ous recipe, but a Google search pro­duced one on the Lakeland site. (Lakeland has now placed a recipe on its web­site along­side the kit it­self.)

An hour or so later, I had a nicely risen dough ready to cut out. Which is when prob­lem two arose. The cut­ter only does ring dough­nuts and there are only four ring moulds in the kit. How was I to cut out the dough­nuts for the filled dough­nut moulds? Lakeland sug­gests ei­ther making a looser mix to pipe into the moulds OR us­ing a reg­u­lar bis­cuit cut­ter of the right di­am­e­ter — as I had. Or you could roll them by hand, but then why bother with the mould?

I rolled my dough too thinly — they should be at least 1cm deep, but the end re­sult turned out of the moulds eas­ily and the baked dough­nuts — which I coated in ic­ing sugar and cin­na­mon — got a thumbs up from my chil­dren.

MUST HAVE/MAYBE/NOT?

This would be a fun bit of kit to play with when cook­ing with chil­dren. It did make per­fectly shaped round cir­cle dough­nuts , but only hav­ing four ring moulds was a pain.

THE DOWN SIDE?

“Health­ier” dough­nuts gave me carte blanche to eat far more than nec­es­sary.